Organizations and businesses of all sizes and missions, buy a diverse array of assets. In diversity, these can extend from computer equipment to cattle. Yet the control, movement, resources available and management of these assets, the ongoing costs to maintain them, their purpose and even where they are located is not obvious to many of their owners. In addition many organizations must comply to industry or government standards with respect to the maintenance of such assets which adds significantly to the “need to know” factors surrounding them. The reliance by organizations on these often high value assets is constant and growing. Yet the costs of securing, managing and maintaining assets are prohibitively expensive and often are not visible to key stakeholders. Decision making as a result occurs in a financial and needs analysis vacuum. The challenge is exacerbated by organizations being at breaking point in terms of budgetary, technology, physical space constraints and a shortage of staff. Due to a lack of transparency and visibility every asset has the potential of being used inefficiently, lost all together or even stolen. Today many organizations cannot find assets, tell you the value of them or their use or be able to see changes in their status. Yet countless hours are spent by employees trying to achieve these through basic applications, spreadsheets and in many cases manual processes. In today's world there are real question marks as to what value these assets are really delivering and much time is wasted in this pursuit. While technology has revolutionized almost every area of business life, technological advancement has paradoxically made it difficult to efficiently take control over these challenges.
There are numerous point based solutions that seek to address parts of the problem but there has not until now been a total solution that covers assets in multiple locations that can deliver critical information in the right form to multiple stakeholders. Point based systems are often very expensive, do not embrace the latest technologies and either can't integrate with other important systems organizations have or find doing so extremely difficult. Their mechanisms are often too cumbersome when seeking to manage assets day to day. It is also typically very tedious and manually intensive to maintain up-to-date information in these solutions.